This will be the systematic catalogue of an
artist born in Spain, but who lived nearly his entire life in Naples.
Far from the romantic stereotypes that qualified him as a painter of
brutality and violence -almost as if he had dipped his brush, to use
Byron’s expression, “in the blood of the saints,”- Ribera reveals
himself capable of expressing with veracity and realism the powerful
emotions experienced in the crude reality of everyday life. He elevates
the lights, the colours, and the atmosphere of the Mediterranean
landscape, enriching to the limit of the incipient Baroque forms and
materials, and enlarging the “true” images of the saints and prophets,
cripples and virgins, with new expressive touches.
